Andrew Garfield in the ‘stark and stirring’ Silence.
Photograph: Allstar/Paramount

Neither cinemagoers nor awards voters made much noise about Silence (Studiocanal, 15), though that was to be expected. If Martin Scorsese’s long-cherished, serenely austere passion project had been an easy sell, it wouldn’t have taken him over a quarter of a century to develop. Two hours and 40 minutes of 17th-century Jesuit priests suffering for their faith in feudal Japan is a pitch itself designed to test the religiosity of Scorsese worshippers. The reward for those who persist, however, is the director’s most nourishing, complex work of the current century – a ravishing antidote to the emptier fever and spectacle of his last few films.

Some have describedSilence as a Catholic artist’s pious, white saviour assertion of devotion at the expense of a Japanese perspective, which doesn’t at all square with the rich, knotty film I saw, with its generous but conflicted sympathies. There is as much admiration here for the naive Portuguese missionaries (led by a puppy-eyed Andrew Garfield, right), tasked with delivering Christianity in the isolationist Edo era, as there is sceptical concern. Likewise, the Japanese who submit and those who resist are regarded with equal understanding. Crafted with painstaking grace and performed with occasional, surprising barbs of wit, Silence isn’t a paean to a single religion, but a stark and stirring study of the very nature of belief and the variable conditions of its expression – a film in which no believer or nonbeliever quite emerges with the upper hand.

Passengers (Sony, 12), meanwhile, invites some spiritual questioning of its own, but doesn’t exactly linger over the answers. They might distract us, after all, from the coy-cute flirtation between Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, the glistening special effects, and yard upon yard of Oscar-nominated, expensive yet inventive production design. There’s early moral intrigue in the premise of this sci-fi trifle, as the mistakenly awoken Pratt, lonesome on a future-bound spacecraft of hibernating earthlings, plays God by rousing Lawrence for his personal benefit. But handsomely dressed romcom wasn’t the way to go here, and neither the well-matched stars nor the aggressively impersonal director, Morten Tyldum, seem to know how lightly to play it.

I was a little annoyed with myself as I sniffled damply through A Monster Calls (eOne, 15). I could feel every well-oiled turn as JA Bayona’s lushly rendered family fantasy wrapped me around its little finger, but it does so with both formal and emotional expertise. Bayona, who previously impressed with the vivid manipulations of The Impossible, shows his full Spielbergian colours with this story of a sensitive young lad (the achingly expressive Lewis MacDougall) who finds an unearthly means of coping with his mother’s terminal cancer. It’s a modern, magical realist fairytale visualised in ever more epic strokes, but with an intimate, anchoring sadness at its core.

Still, Bayona’s film is practically stoic in its machinations next to The Eagle Huntress(Altitude, E), a cheery, picturesque documentary portrait of Aisholpan Nurgaiv, a doughty 13-year-old Mongolian girl smashing the patriarchy in the traditionally male-exclusive world of eagle training. She’s an irresistible protagonist; it’s just a shame Otto Bell’s film, with its selective social context and overegged inspirational flourishes, doesn’t trust her to carry it. More immersive in its cultural unfamiliarity is Tanna (Yume, 12). Australia’s first Oscar nominee for best foreign film is a beguiling, iridescently shot South Pacific swoon, detailing a young, cross-tribal romance in Vanuatu with a classical nod to Romeo and Juliet.